Lung cancer report: “They said it was bronchitis”

Montessa Lee, 31, Silver Spring, Maryland

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Montessa Lee’s chest hurt. The stabbing pain that started in September 2006 seemed to come out of nowhere: She wasn’t sick, exercised regularly, ate a healthy vegetarian diet and didn’t smoke. Concerned there was something wrong with her, the special education teacher went to an urgent-care center, where the doctor ruled out heart trouble and other possible offenders. Assured she was fine, he diagnosed Lee with costochondritis, harmless inflammation around the rib cage. “I had been working out a lot, so I associated the inflammation with that,” Lee says. She left the clinic with ibuprofen and a sense of relief.

The pain abated but returned a month later, bringing with it a cough and shortness of breath. This time, she was treated for bronchitis with antibiotics. “After I finished the meds, I was still coughing, but I had never had bronchitis before, so I thought maybe the cough lingers,” Lee says. During the next two months, her coughing and breathing troubles settled in for good. She couldn’t walk from school to her car without getting winded. One night, while she was driving home from a graduate-school class, the pain suddenly grew intense. “It felt as if someone was stabbing the left side of my chest over and over again,” she says. She made it home safely, then went straight to the emergency room with her cousin. Once again, her heart checked out fine. The bewildered doctors finally ordered a chest X-ray—and there it was: a tumor the size of a small cantaloupe covering three fourths of her left lung. “The doctors were calling out names of what they thought it could be,” Lee remembers. But it wasn’t until after she had had a biopsy and met with an oncologist that Lee learned for sure she had advanced small cell lung cancer.

Though Lee’s tumor was inoperable (it was sitting on her pulmonary vein, which, if cut, could kill her), fortunately it was treatable. She had four months of intense chemotherapy and radiation to shrink it. “My scans show that the cancer is dead,” she says today.

“Lung cancer is the last thing a doctor thinks to look for in young, nonsmoking women,” says Gerold Bepler, M.D., director of the Comprehensive Lung Cancer Research Center at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. Instead, they identify other, less serious conditions that mimic it, such as asthma and bronchitis. But lung cancer rates are higher among women who have never smoked than in male never-smokers. Experts suspect that estrogen—a female hormone that can act as a tumor promoter—may be one factor in the gender difference. And a delayed diagnosis could be deadly: Some tumors are fast-growing and can double in size in as few as two weeks, Dr. Bepler says.

“Anyone who has lungs can get lung cancer,” Lee stresses. She hopes her case will serve as a wake-up call for medical practition?ers to learn to look beyond their assumptions when making a diagnosis, which is why she recently completed training to speak at National Lung Cancer Partnership events. The organization’s Look Deeper campaign aims to make women aware of the signs and prevalence of lung cancer—knowledge that, until better screens or a cure are discovered, is our most powerful weapon in fighting the disease.

Lower your risk for lung cancer

Prevent it Quit smoking, and avoid secondhand smoke. Also, test your home for radon, a natural radioactive gas, which is the second leading risk factor for lung cancer. To order a test kit from the National Safety Council, go to NSC.org.

Screen it Studies have yet to show that routine CAT lung scans can save lives. If you have respiratory symptoms that don’t improve after six weeks, head to your physician’s office and ask for a chest X-ray. If your doc doesn’t listen, find one who will.